Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer

Abstract

In Schwitzgebel (Philosophical Studies 172:1697-1721, 2015) I argued that the United States, considered as a concrete entity with people as some or all of its parts, meets plausible materialistic criteria for consciousness. Kammerer (Philosophia 43:1047-1057, 2015) defends materialism against this seemingly unintuitive conclusion by means of an “anti-nesting principle” according to which group entities cannot be literally phenomenally conscious if they contain phenomenally conscious subparts (such as people) who stand in a certain type of functional relation to the group as a whole. I raise three concerns about Kammerer’s view. First, it’s not clear that it excludes the literal phenomenal consciousness of actually existing groups of people, as one might hope such a principle would do. Second, Kammerer’s principle appears to make the literal phenomenal consciousness of a group depend in an unintuitive way on internal structural details of individuals within the group. Third, the principle appears to be ad hoc.